OFFSTAGE: Justin Moore Takes Aim With “Guns”

(CMT Offstage keeps a 24/7 watch on everything that’s happening with country music artists behind the scenes and out of the spotlight.)

Let me first say that I absolutely love love love Justin Moore‘s new album, Outlaws Like Me. I know there are songs I will have memorized by the end of today (“Run Out of Honky Tonks”). Ones that I will blare from my car speakers with the windows rolled down (“If You Don’t Like My Twang”). And ones I will quote to friends (“Bait a Hook”). But “Guns”? That one I’m not so sure about.

I think it is a really good tune and I suppose I like the idea of it (as will the National Rifle Association) that we all deserve our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. But I just think Moore better be ready to put up a fight if that song ever gets in the wrong hands. Like country radio. What Moore says of the song is, “Someone told me a long time ago that as long as I’m alive and breathing, you won’t take my guns — and that’s where the hook came from.” That may be true but what will people who oppose gun violence think of the hook? Moore is certainly not the first country singer to extol the virtues of having grown up hunting, but this one comes a little closer to controversy with lyrics like “C’mon man, it ain’t like I’m slingin’ ’em on the block” and “Somebody breaks into my house, I’m gonna need my Colt 44.”